FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2024)

FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2024)

Readings:

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalms 95:1-2, 6-9

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

Mark 1:21-28

After calling several of His disciples in last weekend’s gospel, Jesus, today, gets to the primary task before Him – proclaiming the “time of fulfillment,” and literally demonstrating that “the reign of God is at hand.”  The evangelist Mark wastes no time in showing Jesus doing what He was sent into this world to do – to preach and teach, to heal the sick, and, in today’s gospel, to cast out demons.  It is no wonder that  Jesus’ listeners were “astonished” and amazed.  Not only are they astonished, but they recognize Jesus as one who “taught them as one having authority and not as the Scribes.”  Those gathered in the synagogue could recognize something different about this preacher; there was no hint of hypocrisy in anything He said.  Although Jesus has just burst on the scene, it is evident to all those present there is something refreshing and different about Him.  Jesus’ “authority” to teach is a God-given gift, and for those who are not “hard-of-heart” (as in the psalm response), there might have even been the desire to “bow down and worship.”

All of Jesus’ public ministry, of course, is not just marked by words, for His preaching and teaching is also accompanied by ‘deeds,’ and His encounter with the “man with an unclean spirit” (demon possession) shows us that His authority extends beyond the natural world.  It is curious that Mark portrays the demon-possessed man as smarter than most of the so-called ‘religious’ people present, for he not only correctly identifies Jesus as from Nazareth, but, and more importantly, he sees a threat in Jesus who is “the Holy One of God!”  When Jesus orders the unclean spirit to be “quiet” and to “come out of the man,” the demon obeys.  Once more the crowd is “amazed”: “He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey Him.”  Mark goes on to recount that “His fame spread everywhere throughout the whole region of Galilee.”  If this would have been a campaign stop all would be in agreement that this was not a bad start.  This is one of the few times that Jesus’ rubbing shoulders with a religious audience ends positively.  By the middle of the next chapter the familiar tensions with the Scribes and the Pharisees is manifested.

In His ministry Jesus will desire to have Himself viewed as the fulfillment of everything the prophets had to say, something that our regular course of liturgical readings makes explicit.  The Lord’s words to Moses find their fulfillment in Jesus: “I will raise up for them (the Hebrews) a prophet like you from among their kin, and will put my words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command him.  Whoever will  not listen to my words which he speaks in my name, I myself will make him answer for it.”  This is why Jesus is seen as preaching with “authority,” an authority that comes directly from God the Father.

On any given Sunday, we, too, are meant to be “amazed” and “astonished” at the Lord revealed to us in the pages of Scripture.  Over the course of every liturgical year we listen to His Word, proclaimed in the context of the Eucharist, and we are meant to draw closer to the God whose footsteps we declare we will walk in.  Every Eucharist is not only being fed with the Body and Blood of the Lord, but also being fed with His Word, His teaching.  It is because of that that we come to know the Lord better than the demons of this world, and we come to truly love His gospel, through which we gain eternal life.